In the annals of synth-pop history, there’s one name that continually resurfaces. Most famous as one half of Erasure with vocalist Andy Bell, as well as being part-responsible for the emotive brilliance of Yazoo (alongside Alison Moyet), Vince Clarke is regarded as one of the world’s most adept architects of staggeringly successful electronic pop.
But, back at the beginning, when Clarke was merely a schoolboy, it was his partnership with his mate Andy Fletcher that led to the birth of a true behemoth.
Depeche Mode was the result of a meeting of gifted minds, with Vince, Andy, Martin Gore and Dave Gahan uniting to craft that iconic 1981 debut, Speak and Spell. Following which, Clarke departed the band for pastures new.
Vince spoke to us back in 2023, and remembered those early days back when the fledgling Depeche Mode were just kids, jamming in their bedrooms…
“At first, I was making music with Andrew Fletcher – we had a drum machine, he was playing bass and I was playing guitar and singing badly,” Clarke told us.
“Then Martin Gore, who was a friend of Andy’s joined and he had his own synthesizer. We looked at this thing and thought, okay, this is a lot easier than learning chords on a guitar and you only need one finger to play it.”
It was this initial dabbling with Gore’s synth that would trigger a lifelong love affair…
“That’s when I started getting interested in the technology and the fact that I could maybe reproduce or do something similar to the music I loved at the time. It was all-analogue and very expensive, but then so were guitars and amplifiers, so we had all our synths on HP [hire purchase].”
With the early Depeche Mode finding their sonic niche, it soon became clear to Vince that the role of frontman wasn’t one that was a natural fit for himself…
“[Dave Gahan] was someone that we used to see in clubs who was really fashionable, as opposed to us,” Clarke remembered.
In our interview, Vince also recalled how he met the other two signature vocalists that accompanied his most celebrated work.
“I had no illusions about my singing style or capabilities at all and I’ve been very fortunate to have worked with some amazing vocalists, which really proved the point. These people were just mates or within a circle of mates, so to speak. Alison Moyet was in a punk band called The Vandals where my best friend was the guitarist,” Vince recalled.
“Erasure was different because I was working in the studio a lot trying to write songs and make records and after a discussion with the producer we decided that working with different people would be interesting but we really needed someone to be there all of the time. I advertised for a singer in Melody Maker and Andy Bell came along for the audition. He was from Peterborough, but we had very similar backgrounds, which cemented our relationship.”
